1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and recording medium on which a program causing a computer to perform the steps of the method is recorded. More specifically, the present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method and a recording medium for displaying a bone site specified from a bone area extracted from a tomogram image, in units of bone pieces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, tomograms of human body such as CT (Computer Tomography), MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) have been widely used for medical diagnosis, and Computer Aided Diagnosis of Medical Images is known.
In the diagnosis, a bone area is automatically extracted from an X-ray CT image as a preprocessing for displaying a MIP (Maximum Intensity Projection) image, recognizing a bone number, or displaying a bone.
In order to confirm of the result of the automatic extraction of a bone, the generally known volume rendering approach is often used. However, when the object is a skeleton composed of complicated structures, depending on a view position for displaying the image, a plurality of structures are overlapped to each other, and sometimes partly hidden away from the image. In such a case, only a part of the skeleton can be desirably displayed to prevent any hide away.
To address the above problem, conventionally, an approach has been known that divides a plurality of sites or one site into a plurality of objects to selectively display the site.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-22921 describes a three dimensional image displaying apparatus in which a group of object parameters including object parameters for specifying a space area, an opacity, a color of an object and projection processing parameters is switched, so that an image of a new group of objects can be updated and displayed in a plurality of image display regions at one time or in an extremely short period of time.
Also, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-287964 describes a three dimensional image displaying apparatus in which not only the sites having different physical characteristics from each other but also the sites having identical physical characteristics to each other can be separately displayed as a plurality of objects, and also an object to be displayed is selectable for display from a plurality of objects.